Every time the “reptile” line gets trotted out, I can’t help but feel it’s insulting neurodivergent people that don’t exactly share neurotypical body language or traits or mannerisms, but it gets a pass because it’s Zuckerberg, a person people really don’t like.

I also really don’t like ad hominem stuff. By all means, hate Zuckerberg for the actual stuff he’s done wrong. But his looks and mannerisms aren’t why he’s a bad person and I feel bad for innocent people who share a physical resemblance or some mannerisms and constantly see his get dunked on. “Am I also unacceptable? Are they just bringing up anything they can to be hurtful, or does this have an actual basis in reality and they legit have a problem with his looks and mannerisms? What does that say about how people think about me, about how I’ll be treated? Am I commonly perceived as a robot who’s faking their way through humanity too?”

A nice thing we do that’s different from Reddit is being able to edit post titles.

Fits well with the logos used for the communities. I do miss the bee in the cowboy gear though, I hope that image gets repurposed somewhere else on the site.

I appreciate it, good for demonstration and just tickles my funny bone for some reason. I will be delighted if this user gets to 100,000 upvotes—one for every possible iteration of shill#####.

I feel like I’ve seen a ton of comments about how the Fediverse is so nice, but I feel it’s the same as what was my Reddit experience. Just less likely to get enshittified because it’s not corporate, and not optimized for maximum engagement and thus max outrage, so still an upgrade.

Seeing bigots (not on Beehaw, but on other servers), although they’re downvoted to hell and contradicted? Check. (Yes, they were downvoted to hell and contradicted on Reddit too.)

Seeing contrarianism just for the sake of being contrary? Check. Happened twice on my own post. I asked people to please reply with advice to my post and not just “me too” or “I didn’t find a solution lol” and got two “I didn’t find a solution lol” so it’s contrarianism, not just me freaking out over a differing opinion. At best they didn’t fully read my post, didn’t get to the part where I make the request, but somehow I don’t think so and I’m usually the type to try to assume the best of people. Those two replies were thankfully removed by an admin, so unfortunately I don’t have any proof to show you that this happened anymore.

Seeing people being condescending? Check. Lots of “Imagine telling people with real problems [insert the original poster’s complaint about a non-world-ending issue]” type replies. Lots of “touch grass” or “and those who think [other opinion] are dorks who need to go outside more” added when a user disagrees with the person they reply to. Lots of all these other snide things that let you know a user thinks very little of not just your opinion but you as well, merely because they disagree with your opinion. And it’s used against people acting in good faith talking about stuff like video games, not against people spouting bigotry on a server that explicitly has rules against it.

The kicker is I don’t even go on the communities that you’d think would be more likely to get heated, like Politics. I have that blocked.

Maybe it was wrong of me to say this was like my Reddit experience. It was like my Reddit experience when I wandered into bigger subs. When I stayed in my niche topic subreddits I rarely saw this kind of behavior.

I still post here out of habit and to try to contribute to the Fediverse’s activity. But I see something like this in at least 75% of my Beehaw sessions. (Yes, I report the meanness when I see it.) I’m probably going to slow my activity and fall off, back to a Kbin server and a different Lemmy server where all I sub to is tiny hobby communities that don’t have any of this behavior. And where they didn’t promote themselves as a nice space, so I’ll be less shocked if I do run into bad behavior. I understand bad actors are everywhere but most of the people seem like abrasive actors and less like intentional disruptors—perhaps it’s people not being too aware of the norms of the instance they’re on because they come from a different server. But I’ve also seen this kind of behavior from people who are on Beehaw accounts. Would think group norms would filter the meanness out, but I encounter it more often here than I do in other places. Honestly not sure how to fix it, otherwise I’d be posting my suggestions because I really do want people to have a nice experience on the be(e) nice server, including myself.

I’m glad everyone else seems to be having a good experience.

I feel like emojis can serve as useful tone markers. Like /s but for many different emotions and intentions than just sarcasm. “It’s raining today 😒” comes off differently than “it’s raining today 😊” does.

I also feel some people just use them for visual noise, and because emojis are “the thing the kids do” semi-relevant emojis get spammed where they aren’t needed. For example, “look at my cat 👀🐱🐾”. That annoys me. I admit maybe it’s just annoyance with no actual reasoning behind it. It might be annoyance a lot of other people share given how unpopular emojis were on Reddit.

I don’t think we need to be as emojiphobic as Reddit, but we probably ❓ don’t 🙅 want them spammed ✉️✉️✉️❌😠 everywhere 🌎🌍🌏 either.

bisexual: sexually or romantically attracted to both men and women, or to more than one sex or gender.

Nowhere here does it say you have to have your attraction equally split between genders. You can be attracted to the opposite sex way more often than you are attracted to the same sex and still be bisexual. 95% opposite sex, 5% same sex still qualifies.

Cis woman attracted to men here. If I woke up tomorrow looking like the most attractive man I’d ever seen, I would freak out and find a doctor who would help me transition back as soon as possible.

For anyone wondering what V&V is, it’s Vegan and Vegetarian. Found it as one of the new communities on this post. Might be obvious to some, but I am newer to Beehaw than that post is so I didn’t know until I searched V&V and found that post.

You may have heard about this on Beehaw! There was just a post about it here, including thoughts about peoples’ experience with the game.

Does your mother apply the same standard to minors who identify as straight?

I’ve actually met some people who will honestly say, if questioned, that it’s also too young to know for sure if you’re straight, so even though it doesn’t respect self-knowledge it’s consistently applied and therefore doesn’t really read as homophobic. But in most cases this kind of talk is just homophobic invalidation and bringing up the above question can help a person realize what was wrong about them saying you’re too young to know. The exact wording I used there isn’t offensive if you’re reading the exact words, but it could absolutely be taken as aggressive and hostile, especially if said in a (justifiably) defensive tone, so you might want to reword it.

There’s probably also evidence for your conclusion about your sexuality: experienced attraction to the same gender and lack of attraction to members of the opposite gender. While someone could attempt to explain away the lack of attraction to the opposite gender as “just have not met the right person yet,” they must then also apply that to every straight person and consider they might be bi but haven’t met the right same-gender person. Presence of attraction is a lot harder to explain away. “You’re confused,” list out the symptoms and ask how it’s any different from what [straight person in your lives] feels for [their partner], and how they’re sure that straight person is not confused. At the very least, this should open people up to possibilities other than straight. It’s possible to think you are gay and then find you’re bi (or you were actually gay, but sexuality is fluid for some and you changed) with an extremely heavy preference towards the same gender, that’s been an experience I’ve seen in LGBTQ+ communities in the past, but somehow I doubt that your mother is referring to this possibility when she says you’re too young to know.

This is more meant as stuff to say to people who don’t believe you than for what to say in the initial coming-out process :P

You can try to push past your emotions and experience with a bad coming out and tell someone. Hopefully this would be someone who you can point to prior evidence of being accepting—getting another negative response isn’t conducive to most people being willing to come out again. Or you can wait until your feelings change. Or you can just not do it. As someone else said, no pressure to come out, only do it if you want to, and you already managed to come out to us.

This article is “How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)” and it tells you how Googled killed a federated protocol for instant messaging, XMPP, by the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish process.

Thank you for posting the article text on Beehaw! :)

I’d even be fine with a bit of increase. Have to keep pace with inflation, make sure you’re making enough to keep all your workers’ wages worth the same this year as it was last year.

But they want MORE profit NOW NOW NOW at a much higher rate than needed to keep pace with inflation, and the money sure isn’t going to workers to keep their wages at pace with inflation.

They said kids who failed the marshmallow test (eat one marshmallow now or wait and get two? basically, a test of if you can do delayed gratification or not) were less likely to fail than kids who passed it. But it looks like the instant gratification MORE PROFIT NOW NOW NOW guys are winning. But only if you’re super rich.

Obsidian. Silver Bullet is a FOSS alternative, but I’m not sure if they do toggles or something that works like it. And I really like my toggle-like functionality. I happily use callouts to simulate toggles in Obsidian.

Have you seen https://www.themanequest.com/? It's aimed at people like you trying to find a high-quality horse game. Tons of reviews of horse games on that site. I'm not even into horses but the website captivated me anyways.

I’m so pleased about this feature and would be discouraged if Lemmy and Kbin implement an algorithm for everyone in a way you can’t turn off.

While there’s a need for fighting injustice, for stopping other people from tearing queer people down, there’s also a need for lifting them up. And although big things like trying to make a blockbuster hit movie that focuses on queer perspectives or making a website that hosts resources to learn about LGBTQ+ people and issues (both for LGBTQ+ themselves and allies!) are important, so are smaller day-to-day things. Especially when we’re not all webmasters who work in the movie industry.

I’ve seen this guy’s stuff floating around on the Fediverse recently—first the enshittification article and now this. Seems pretty interesting, thank you for sharing!

Cis, just didn’t like my birth name because I don’t like the sound of it. Weirdly enough I’m fine hearing it said if you aren’t speaking to or about me. If you’re talking to or about someone else named [my birth name] it doesn’t bother me to hear the name at all.

Found my new name by going through baby name websites and writing down every name for girls that I liked. (I prefer to be very gender-conforming in my outward presentation and want my name to be so as well.) It was a very long list. Over time, I culled names from the list and ended up with two final choices. I forget how I decided between them, but what I can say is that during the entire process, I picked names based on how they sounded to me. After all, my grievance with my birth name is how it irritates me to hear it. I did not look up the meanings behind the names. They can be interesting, but my birth name had a perfectly fine meaning and that did nothing to endear me to it.

rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda

Honestly never thought of the insults as actually useful, just people wanting to vent aggression. “Hateful fascist” has meaning and depending on context, it might make me investigate the person being called such to see if that checks out, or even totally dismiss them. It tells me about the other person’s views. “Inhuman reptile” gets thrown in the trash immediately. And stuff about someone being ugly, that’s a reason for me to not hire you as a model or take your advice on how to look good. Not a reason to join the side against you. A lot of it really just looks like aggression. This stuff is mostly useful for evaluating “how popular is this side and how much can I expect to be personally attacked for it if I publicly side with them?”

I’m also neurodivergent. So perhaps in this case what’s effective on others might not work on me. I also have a history of getting emotional and hating any “not nice” behavior even if it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of legitimate awful behavior the other side does. I end up recognizing and siding against the ocean of awfulness, but still get very upset at “not nice” behavior against them that seems to serve zero purpose to actually stop them. And this kind of insulting definitely flags as “not nice” regardless of its ends. Unlike violence in self-defense against someone trying to punch you, I can’t think of when this would become a necessary evil. But again, it’s through the lens of my own experiences, where this kind of talk immediately gets tossed out.

EDIT after we seem to have finished discussion, just saw a relevant thought somewhere else online (old Reddit comment of mine that I was in the process of deleting) that seemed very relevant to this conversation. Adding it for any onlookers.

Some of the insults could be taken as conditional acceptance for minorities. If you stay in line, your identity is valid, if you step out your identity is now unacceptable. I’m thinking things like misgendering an awful trans person. The point is probably just to hurt that person and show disapproval for their legitimately harmful actions, but it could probably make other trans people wonder if the person doing the misgendering is actually a trans ally, or if they don’t actually accept trans people but keep their mouth shut around pleasant people and now they’re going mask off now that their target is someone they don’t care about. Keeping your mouth shut around pleasant people is still better than always being visibly unaccepting, but I imagine seeing a person misgender a bad trans person could shake the faith of trans people in just how much support they have. After all, we don’t misgender horrible cis people.

Same deal with insulting based on stuff we are fighting against. Do you really accept us neurodivergent, us less-than-conventionally-attractive and it’s just a propaganda tactic, or do you not accept us but choose to hold your tongue in most situations? How much real support do we have? If you dislike us, will we get the same identity-based insults that we see online towards people like Zuckerberg or do you just reserve that for big public figures and murderers? Is your acceptance of our demographic/identity conditional on your personal feelings towards us?

As someone who personally wouldn't care at all if someone made AI porn of me and masturbated to it, I am incredibly uncomfortable with the idea that someone who doesn't like me may have the option to generate AI porn of me having sex with a child. Now there's fake "proof" I'm a pedophile, and I get my life ruined for sex I never had, for violation of consent I never actually committed. Even if I'm vindicated in court, I might still be convicted in the court of public opinion. And people could post faked porn of me and send it to companies to try to say "Evergreen5970 is promiscuous, don't hire them." Not all of us have the luxury of being able to pick and choose between companies depending on whether they match our values, some of us have to take what they can get and sometimes that would include companies that would judge you for taking nude photos of yourself. It would feel especially bad given I'm a virgin by choice who has never taken nudes let alone sent them. Punished for something I didn't do.

Not everyone is going to restrict their use to their private wank sessions, to making a real image of the stuff they probably already envision in their imagination. Some will do their best to make its results public with the full intention of using it to do harm.

And once faking abuse with AI porn becomes well-known, it might discredit actual photographic/video proof of CSAM happening. Humans get fooled by whether an AI-generated image was taken by a human or generated by AI, and AI doesn't detect AI-generated images with a perfect accuracy rate. So the question becomes "how can we trust any image anymore?" Not to mention the ability to generate new CSAM with AI. Some more mainstream AI models might try to tweak algorithms to prevent people from generating any porn involving minors, but there'll probably always be some floating around with those guardrails turned off.

I'm also very wary of dismissing other peoples' discomfort just because I don't share it. I'm still worried for people who would care about someone making AI porn of them even if it was just to masturbate with and kept private.

I kind of get where you’re coming from with “it’s our fault for not wanting to deal with the burden of knowledge,” but it feels a little bit like blaming people for not being superhuman. One person can’t always learn everything. It’s my fault for not knowing how to fix every single thing that can go wrong with a house, because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of plumbing, electricity, and carpentry. It’s my fault I can’t cure myself and have to rely on a doctor because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of medicine and surgery. It’s my fault I have to buy food from the store because I didn’t want the burden of knowledge of gardening and agriculture.

Not everyone wants to spend time learning about something they don’t have an interest in when there are other ways to take care of it. We’re not all Renaissance folk (in the sense of having knowledge about everything) and sometimes we need a little help from other people. Sometimes certain topics are legitimately hard for some people to understand. Sometimes people figure that it doesn’t benefit them to learn the ins and outs of something that they can have someone else fix for them—they have other things they need to do that are more pressing.

As a non-car-enthusiast, I think it’s okay for me to want a car that “just works”. As a person who isn’t a plumber, electrician, or carpenter I think it’s okay to want a house that “just works”. If I weren’t a somewhat-tech person, I would probably want my technology to “just work”. We all want things that we’re not experts in to just work, to not have to acquire expert knowledge to use it at all.

This all comes from a place of me trying not to be condescending to people who don’t have knowledge that I have. I am an arrogant person with little patience. So I usually have to argue against my own “do you seriously not know this, what idiot doesn’t” tendencies, both to be a better person and to avoid the social consequences of being an arrogant jerk. So I may have swung a little too hard towards no user accountability or responsibility to learn about the thing you’re using.

I just want to post my little comments online without having it tied to my identity. Why? More people see what I say than in real life, some of them could be crazies. I don’t want my real identity right there for the SWATting the second I say I like to knit because it’s a craft of Satan and his ilk or something. Or more likely, that I support LGBTQ+ rights so blacklist me, and kill me for not following the laws of your religion that considers this a bad thing. I want this hidden behind Evergreen5970 so if you want to hurt me you at least have to put some work in to find me, which is a wonderful deterrent for this behavior.

This is why I have a nasty cycle of

1. enter neurodivergent space
2. see ”NT bad”
3. leave neurodivergent space

Yall, just like we’re not a monolith, NTs aren’t either!? I don’t like identity-based generalizations. I also understand the need for minorities to vent, and sometimes it involves harsh language and generalizations they don’t actually believe. And sometimes it’s hard for me to see the line between “this is a vent and I, and the community at large, don’t actually believe that all NTs are inferior people, I just had a frustrating experience with many and want to vent without being tone policed” and “it’s just venting, back off tone policer, nevermind that I actually do truly believe that the filthy NTs are inferior.”

However, either one will drive me, a minority who the space is intended for, out. Wonder if there will ever be a spot for minorities that is both modded to be free of bigotry, but also doesn’t allow the venting.

EDIT: not criticizing the Beehaw neurodivergence community, haven’t looked there yet

It is always frustrating trying to determine if these people actually believe what they’re saying, or if they’re grasping for anything they can say to be hurtful. Do they actually believe you are a woman in their heart, and just contradict their own beliefs in the name of hurting the bad person with the bad opinion? Or do they think you are all faking but decide to humor the pleasant people about their gender and mask-off around anyone they dislike? Either way, it creates an environment of “do you really accept my identity as valid, or is it conditional upon whether you like me?” Not the kind of thing that should be happening at all, let alone at Pride.

I’ll guess that if you bought a subscription to the website, you don’t see the paywall. So you might share it like anything else cool online, forgetting that this thing is paywalled and not everyone will be able to see it.

I want to add that I’ve been led to believe that for many people who experience romantic and sexual attraction, kissing someone or cuddling them can start up a desire to “go further,” to add tongue and groping genital areas and eventually end in sex.

I am asexual, but I have experience with romantic attraction. For me, I’ve always been satisfied with kissing and cuddling. It doesn’t cross my mind to maybe start turning the encounter sexual, and I definitely do not want this to lead to sex.

Also, some asexuals are totally okay with and may even seek out sex. The key thing that links all asexuals together regardless of how often we seek out sex or how much we enjoy it is that we don’t experience sexual desire. Think of it like you can not be hungry for food (not experience sexual desire ever), but choose to consume it anyways because it tastes good (choose to have sex because it feels physically good) or because it makes your partner happy. You could accurately say that you like food but don’t ever get hungry (like sex but don’t experience sexual attraction). Except in this case, it’s an actual valid orientation and not a reason to get checked out by a doctor the way you probably should if you’re never hungry.

There are also some of us who do experience a libido, a sex drive, but it still won’t make us look at a person and think “I’d tap that.” We might satisfy it with sex or masturbation, but the key difference is that we don’t feel that same strong impulse to have sex with someone else that other people describe as being so intense it’s a “need” and a passionate longing for their object of desire.

I saw a comment further down where you’re trying to learn more. https://www.asexuality-handbook.com/home.html is a pretty nice resource.

Also piggybacking to say that aesthetic attraction can exist without romantic attraction as well.

There are lots of girls who look good, and who I like looking at. However, I’ve never felt any urge to have sex with them or take them on dates.

It’s basically like looking at sunsets or cute animals, but with people instead. You’d never have sex with them or date them, but they sure are enjoyable to look at.

Thank you for the transcript! I hate watching videos when I can read their content faster, and I will usually not bother to go to youtubetranscript.com. So thanks for providing the link for us

Many (tho not all!) humans are sexual beings with sexual desires and motivations.

Thanks for the acknowledgment of asexual people like me 😊

Assuming people actually apply the attitude consistently instead of only to non-straight people, I’m not sure what to think, honestly. There are always going to be people who are made uncomfortable by PDA from any couple, including straight couples. Back when straight was default I knew people who would react unhappily to a straight couple making out and even basic kissing was really pushing it. It seems somehow callous to condemn these people if they apply this standard to everyone equally, it feels like saying “your discomfort is wrong, fix it and stop being so sensitive.” But I also understand that often, if something won’t make a majority of people uncomfortable and isn’t disrespectful/actively harmful it’s usually the responsibility of the uncomfortable person to remove themselves from the situation.

Social norms have conditioned me into not finding a couple groping each other in public a socially acceptable thing, even if I don’t feel any discomfort with it. The only taboo against displays of affection that I think lies in something other than making people feel uneasy is “no sex in public” because of all the fluids produced. If not cleaned up well and quickly, it sounds ripe for infecting people who unknowingly, say, sit on the same bench someone had sex on. Especially if they have a small cut on the back of their thigh, and it touches where the fluids were… Same logic as “use a toilet, don’t go in public.” No biohazards in public please.

I’m totally fine with any PDA that isn’t actual sex in public, and the sex reservation is only because of the concern I mentioned above for STDs. I’m making a lot of devil’s advocate arguments against my own perspective because I also want to respect others’ comfort levels and I’m not sure where exactly the line should be drawn.

For some people, talking about this is fun. Let them have it. For some people who are interested in this it’s not annoying at all.

I don’t click on articles I don’t care about and find pointless. I let the people who care about [insert interest I find boring here] talk about it without telling them they’re showcasing the most annoying parts of autistic people, or conversely showcasing the worst shallow impulses of humanity instead of caring about something really important. People are allowed to have interests that aren’t historymaking and activism, and interests that many others do not share.

I have autism and admittedly feel kind of on the defense because of your comment. I don’t go around talking about the most annoying aspects of neurotypicals or any other demographic, I thought that was kind of a jerkish and (sometimes low-key) discriminatory thing to do. Also, one social rule I learned is to live and let live and I tend not to handle the whole “it’s basically nothing, can’t believe someone cares about this” kind of comment well. Kind of disappointed your comment has this many upvotes.

Hey, using asterisks here will put things in italics if you happen to enclose any text in between them.

The quick brown fox *jumped* over the lazy dog.

becomes

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

If you want to censor words, you’ll need a backslash.

F\*ck this sh\*t, I’m out.

will display as

F*ck this sh*t, I’m out.

but if you do not use the backslashes, you will instead get

Fck this sht, I’m out.

Also, aromantic people are the people who do not want romance. Romantic people do want romance.

I’m having a similar problem. Trying to grow a niche community. The subreddit for it has rules about promoting other communities that condemns my post to a weekly self-promotion thread nobody looks at even though I have no authority in that community, so that method of growth is essentially locked off. Already advertised it in some “look at this new community!” communities. I am one of a few posters there, and it feels bad. I’m lucky enough to have a small close-knit Discord group surrounding the same interest, but if I wasn’t I would probably have to go crawling back to Reddit to discuss the topic. For what it’s worth I do try to post comments on any post where I have something to add. Sometimes it’s even a fairly useless “thanks, this was really interesting” comment just to help boost Fediverse engagement.

I’m using a different account to grow the community. Because I’m one of a few posters there and I’d rather not make life easier for potential doxxers, I’d rather not give out the community name. Don’t want to link two different accounts together as owned by the same person.

It's another example of the effect of meeting people from X demographic making you more tolerant of X demographic. It's good to have lots of real and concrete examples of known effects to prove that the effect is indeed real and still applies in the modern day. "Look, it's not just a hypothesis, here is it actually happening! Several examples so you know it's not a fluke! Something recent so you know a culture shift or whatever hasn't neutered it!"

I learned about this effect through reading stuff on the internet when I was young. It might be some other 10-year-old onlooker's first intro to it.

Huh, I’ve always thought “queer” encompasses both those who fit neatly into the gay, lesbian, bi, or trans bins as well as those who don’t. In other words, I thought it meant

a person who is at least one of:

• not cisgender

• not heterosexual

• not heteroromantic

So basically the same as LGBTQ+ except that 1) it’s easier to say than LGBTQ+ and 2) it’s a reclaimed word that not all people in the community have reclaimed so it will make more of the people it describes uncomfortable than “LGBTQ+” will.

Wonder if it’s a case of people being discriminated against, so instead of standing in solidarity with their fellow victims they’re looking for a taste of power, of being on the other side.

I’ve known about Tor since like middle school but have been scared downloading it will get me on some watchlist. Or at the very least, tracked harder whenever I’m not on a Tor browser for whatever reason.

I live in the United States of America. Tor was developed by my own country’s naval research laboratory.

Wondering if we can have the origin of the name Beehaw as part of the Beehaw documentation. I skimmed the documentation before asking this question and didn’t find it there, which is why I ended up asking here.

I have no shame and don’t care if people fantasize about me or make porn as long as they respect my “no”s for real physical contact.

I am also aware that sometimes, people don’t like you and they go for disproportionate retribution. I would not like to have porn deepfaked of me and it spread around as “she took this of herself, what a slut, fire her/do not hire her.” (I’m not exactly in a position to be able to pick and choose companies who share my values and wouldn’t care what non-hateful activities I might get up to in my off hours, I need to increase my skills so I’m desirable enough to be able to actually reject job offers.) I would also not like people to deepfake me having sex with a child and use a very good AI fake as “proof” I am a pedophile. Such an accusation will stick. And it would feel especially bad because I’m a virgin by choice and don’t desire sexual contact with anyone (I’m asexual), so for me to be painted as someone who would choose a nonconsensual sex act…

I’d be okay with personal use of these images even if they were of me, but the reality is that it’s possible to use this for more than just an innocent masturbation session. There are more ways others’ judgment can affect you than just shame and feelings.

Not to say that it is right to make these images just because I would personally be unbothered if it were me, just trying to also add other ways it can negatively affect people, including people like me who have no shame.